We may think of Shakespeare as England’s poet, but he's a lot more international than that. In De Oscuro’s MacBeth the dancer-actors speak extracts from Shakespeare’s play not just in the original English, but also in a new Welsh translation by Mererid Hopwood and occasionally in Polish and Hebrew. They're far from the first to let Shakespeare loose in other languages.

Shakespeare originated an estimated 2,000 English words commonly used today – including ‘bump’, 'swagger', 'eyeball' and 'obscene'. Modern English wouldn't be what it is without Shakespeare. But the plays written 400 years ago by a man from the Midlands have had a global appeal for centuries.

Groundbreaking though the Globe's festival was, it did not showcase a new phenomenon. Shakespeare has been around in translation as far back as the poet's lifetime. In the early 1600s English theatre companies on tour in Europe performed versions of Shakespeare's plays, first in English but soon adapted to the local vernacular – a German version of Titus Andronicus was published as early as 1620. In some places the popularity of the plays engendered a whole new culture of theatre – Shakespeare is still seen as a key progenitor of German theatre.

Though German came first, translations to other languages followed in the 18th century, with Voltaire's French translations in the 1730s, Sumarokov's Russian in 1750 and translations into Italian (1756), Spanish (1772), Czech (1786), and more translations across the rest of Europe. On the back of the British Empire, Shakespeare was performed in Calcutta in the 1780s in Marthi, Gujurati and Parsi, and Urdu translations came in the 19th century. Elsewhere we have translations into Hebrew (1874), Japanese (1885), Arabic (1890s), Korean (1921) and Chinese (1922). With the translation of Hamlet into Klingon in 2000, you could say the final frontier has been crossed.